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the Wireless Speed Wheel is completely wireless and controlled intuitively with precise steering, standard controller buttons/triggers, and haptic feedback with rumble. The device is compatible with all racing games right out of the box. With trigger buttons for gas and brake, combined with a rumble feedback, the Xbox 360 Wireless Speed Wheel provides intuitive standard controller buttons that immerse the driver into the game, whether you like to white knuckle it down the race track with your hands at “10 and 2” or “9 and 3.

I'm anticipating all the people complaining when they drop their controller and the screen breaks.

"…I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than
you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods,
you will understand why I dismiss yours." - Stephen F. Roberts

Getting around the city was a joy once I learned how to use the grappling hook to gain momentum and glide from place to place. You can tuck forward into a dive to gain speed, and then grapple to a faraway location to get more speed and height. In this way you can fly nearly anywhere you can see very quickly. You can also attach yourself to passing helicopters if you'd like a lazier approach.

Batman feels agile, and his movements match the massive city around him. It takes a little bit of practice and muscle memory to master the controls, but once you get them down, it's very freeing.

You can dial into the frequencies of the radios and phones the criminals use to communicate, and you can listen to nearby thugs talking as you fly about. You can drop down and break up a brawl, or simply glide above it to your next destination. I dropped down once or twice and discovered that the free-flowing combat feels just as good as it did in the first game, with a series of new moves. It's fun to grab an enemy with the grappling hook, pull him towards you, and then clothesline him out of the air. The fighting is appropriately brutal and, while Batman never kills anyone, he certainly breaks bones and does what looks like permanent damage.

I'm sure there will be GTA like limits at the outset, but it'd be nice if the entire city is open from the get go.

Cloud gaming poster child OnLive took the opportunity at E3 to show off its tablet-bound OnLive Player application, coming to both iPad and Android devices "later this year," while providing "far higher performance, richer gameplay and deeper social integration than any console announced for 2012." Yeah, that's a not-so-subtle dig at the Wii U.

While the OnLive Viewer app currently available doesn't allow for actually playing OnLive on a tablet, the upcoming Player app "will enable gameplay of virtually all OnLive games on an iPad and Android tablet with touch or OnLive's new Universal Wireless Controller." Demoed in the video below is Ubisoft's From Dust, which accepts touch-based input on the tablet applications.

Even more notable, considering Nintendo's latest console announcement, is news that the OnLive Player app will allow "the tablet to be used as a touch and motion controller combined with an HDTV (or PC/Mac if preferred)." The tablet can even enable "both synchronized or independent video on the tablet and HDTV screen, enabling combined gameplay with tablet and HDTV" or, more like the concepts we saw of Wii U, "separate gameplay on tablet and HDTV."

It took Sony and MS 3-4 years to catch up to the Nintendo Wii's motion controls. This time round, companies are announcing similar devices that may beat the Wii U to market. Good luck, Nintendo.

Real Racing 2-dev (and recent EA acquisition) Firemint took the opportunity at WWDC today to announce AirPlay support for its latest iOS racer. When the just-announced iOS 5 is released later this year, it will enable AirPlay video mirroring support, which Firemint will be using to do a lot more than just mirroring; the iPad 2 will be able to wirelessly send an HD signal to your Apple TV while using the iPad 2 to handle real-time racing telemetry and tilt-based steering.

Surprisingly, Nintendo wasn't the one to answer the question that's been at the forefront of our minds since John Riccitiello talked up the Wii U's online capabilities: Ubisoft recently told MTV Multiplayer that the system will get rid of the maligned Friend Codes system in favor of a single online identity (think: Gamertag). Players will also be able to build friends lists without the laborious process of swapping serial numbers.

There seems to be some debate over whether this is a unified console-wide system or individual title-to-title, publisher-to-publisher system.

Respawn Entertainment, the new studio founded by Call of Duty creators Jason West and Vince Zampella following their messy split from Activision, is of course working on a shooter. But what kind of shooter? A future shooter, that's what.

Click through, and If you recognize the article image header, you are awesome... and old.

It took Sony and MS 3-4 years to catch up to the Nintendo Wii's motion controls. This time round, companies are announcing similar devices that may beat the Wii U to market. Good luck, Nintendo.

Last time, Sony and MS were laughing and being condescending when it was announced, and only reacted when the Wii sales numbers came in. This time, everyone has learned their lesson that Nintendo is someone to copy. Compare the initial reactions to the iPod and the iPad.

BTW, Copter 2 has the same setup (with an iPhone and iPad) and has had it for some time now.

It's not surprising, because it has been their MO for some time now to support one generation back, but it is notable because the Gamecube CPU and GPU are a perfect subset of the Wii. It should be trivial for Nintendo to support it. Maybe it's the optical disc hardware that is the issue - the Gamecube used a special proprietary disc that might be tricky to support.

Anyway: I'm sure that all the successful Gamecube games will show up in the Virtual Console soon enough.

The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.

Last time, Sony and MS were laughing and being condescending when it was announced, and only reacted when the Wii sales numbers came in. This time, everyone has learned their lesson that Nintendo is someone to copy.

Isn't Nintendo copying Apple though? That's why there are similar products at E3. if this thing was truly unique there wouldn't be similar products around the show.

Talking during the session, and reported by games site IGN, SCEE vice president Michael Denny noted that, as far as he was aware, the console is going to be region free, allowing games from any region to be played on any Vita console.

This subject usually gets blown into a bigger deal than it is, but I think it's one of those things that makes a select group of gamers really, really happy.

Company president Satoru Iwata, speaking with the London Evening Standard, says that while he doesn't think Nintendo has made a "blunder", he does admit that people might be confused with the way the Wii U was unveiled.

"Because we put so much emphasis on the controller, there appeared to be some misunderstandings", he said. "We should have made more effort to explain how it works."

Though E3 attendees may be crazy for it, investors are continuing to express their displeasure with the Wii U. Nintendo's stock lost another five percent after a similar fall on Tuesday, the first day after the new hardware was announced at E3. At the time of this writing, the stock is down to 16,170 yen per share on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, another 800 yen loss from the previous day's close of 16,970.

That is, however, a slight climb from the day's low of 16,040 earlier in the day. Company shares haven't been this low since before Nintendo's massively successful Wii console was released in 2006.

Investing in a new console is never cheap, but considering the main input method for the Wii U is a controller with a screen in it, we were understandably daunted by the idea of having to buy multiple WiiPads. According to Shigeru Miyamoto (probably known best as the senior producer on Chibi Robo) we needn't have worried.

Miyamoto told GamePro that the Wii U will only support one WiiPad, explaining that if the company had wanted to do multiple touchscreens it would have found a way to let players use 3DS systems with the new console.

Miyamoto didn't rule out the possibility of letting you take your WiiPad to a friends house and linking up play somehow, but it doesn't seem to be actively in the works at the moment.

•PSP titles, minis and PSone classics will be playable via the PlayStation Store. There are no "plans to make PS Vita compatible with PS3 or PS2 titles at this point."
Internal memory? "PS Vita is equipped with the storage media slot so that users can choose what memory capacity they want to utilize depending on their use."
•Will we have to rebuy digital versions of UMD-based games we already own? "We will consider every possibility for support on bought UMD games but we have nothing to comment at this point in time."
•No video output feature
•The battery will be embedded because of the rear touch pad (and PSP piracy)

while back, a thread on 4chan was started by someone claiming to work for Activision. Their post asked for feedback on Modern Warfare, and the replies proceeded to talk all about the startling lack of dinosaurs in those games. Hey, it's true!

In the multiplayer mode shown on stage, one player used a Classic Controller Pro for a traditional FPS-type experience. But the other player, on the WiiPad, is presented with a top-down view of the map, and an inventory of various freaks to drop on the opponent. So while one player is experiencing an FPS with rapidly spawning enemies, the other one is playing a top-down action/strategy game about placing creatures in the right positions at the right times to overwhelm the poor guy on the street.

Speaking with IndustryGamers earlier today, Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia said "Some of the developers we spoke to indicated to us that the console will have 50% more processing power compared to the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360. This is yet to be confirmed by Nintendo."

I've been reading some discussions on the potential of the Wii U, and it really feels like it's legacy as not another Wii (in terms of power) is entirely dependent on when MS decides to throw it's hat into the next gen ring.

If you believe the 10 year cycle (slating a "720" for 2016) that would give the Wii U 4 years as the most powerful console on the market. But I don't believe that will be the case. I think the latest MS releases their next platform is 2014 (The 360 is selling strong, after all), which gives Nintendo a whole two years on market before they become the underdog again.

Further, this doesn't even consider that some of this power will have to be used to process and stream a second set of video to the uPad. While it might not cost 1/3rd of the processor, I'm sure it'll take enough of a chunk to make the Wii U's somewhat significant advantage in processing power insignificant.

Child of Eden tasks you with reviving Lumi, the first human born in space, whose digital imprint has been saved on a newfangled, highly stylized version of the internet. Her memory is under assault from a vast fleet of neon-hued viruses which the player must "purify" by sailing through the five beautifully infected archives which contain her personality. It sounds a tad silly on paper, but each glimpse you catch of the besieged Lumi (as well as the frequent glimpses of the ancient Earth she represents) is surprisingly invigorating.

Players purify each archive using the "Octo-Lock" laser, a returning armament from Q Entertainment's last on-rails rhythm shooter, Rez. Using this primary weapon, players can lock onto and destroy up to eight targets at a time, earning extra points if they activate the beam in sync with the background music. Players also have a Tracer beam that fires a constant stream of bullets which net the player fewer points -- however, certain targets can only be purified using the Tracer, including incoming missiles from enemy viruses.

Though returning Rez players seeking an authentic experience can use a standard controller to adequately romp through the colorful campaign, Child of Eden is made for motion controls. When playing with Kinect, the Octo-Lock is bound to your right hand, requiring you to dramatically thrust your palm forward to launch your targeted salvo. The left is bound to the Tracer, which you'll wield more frequently as the archives increase in difficulty. In the game's most frantic moments, you'll swap between weapons with frequency, moving your arms and pushing your hands to the rhythm of the music, trying to find a balance between survival and sound.

It is at this point that you realize that you're not playing Child of Eden; you are conducting it.

With Sony's famous lawsuit against GeoHot storming headlines this year, Sony has earned itself a reputation for being against console customization. The company is a villain among the modding community, who believe Sony stands against the freedom to do whatever one likes with their property.

According to Sony boss Jack Tretton, however, that perception is wrong. Sony may be anti-piracy, but it's not against you modifying your PS3 in the name of innovation.

"No, there’s a real misnomer there, we embrace independent game development," he said, "If you call that hacking, then we embrace that. We give people tools that let them create new experiences. What I don’t think we are in support of is someone trying to hack our device to pirate software and possibly collapse the platform."

Tretton flatly denied the accusation that Sony wants to deter users from modifying their systems, which is quite a contrast against the freedom hating corporation that some perceive. Quite a surprising statement, given the fact that Sony releases new firmware regularly to stop its hardware being modded.

Let's be upfront here: we don't know thing one about chipsets and motherboards. We play video games, we don't build the hardware they come on. But our friends at Engadget, well, they're all about that kinda stuff. So when they tell us that Nintendo's Wii U console will come packing a custom Radeon GPU with a chip similar to the R770, and that the chip is competitively stronger than the GPUs of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, we believe them.

More than 2 million gamers have signed up at callofduty.com/elite so far — and they hit that number in less than two weeks. That should give the dev team at Beachhead plenty to work with to kick off the beta, which officially starts July 14.

According to a report from Kyodo News, citing official Japanese government documentation, Sony Computer Entertainment knowingly delayed telling the public about the extent of an attack on its PlayStation Network so as not to "bewilder" its customers.

On a related note, the way hacking has been permeating the net since, I feel like XBOX Live being attacked this year is a matter of when, not if.

If you want to play Crysis 2 on PC (it's worth it) and want to buy the Steam version, you're shit out of luck. Electronic Arts has pulled the Crytek sequel from Steam in order to make it exclusive to its own digital download service, Origin.

It would appear EA is hoping to entice customers away from Valve, which seems like a dumb move. Despite the game now getting an "Only on Origin" tag, it's still available on Direct2Drive and Impulse. Alice: Madness Returns and Star Wars: The Old Republic are also going to be digital exclusives to Origin.

No, the reason we had to drop Custom soundtrack support like that has nothing to do with Microsoft. It does, however, involve a different company. A rather large company.
You see, one of their games happened to fall into the 5% that didn't support in-game custom soundtracks. And they did not like this.
When they found out that a new firmware update was going to suddenly make one of their games look inferior to just about every other game released, they protested. A lot.
They threatened everything, from legal action to dropping support for the PS3 all together.

So in other words, it's EA's fault? Somehow that seems...convenient. I didn't understand all of the jargon, but even though all he's say may be true, if Sony really wanted cross-game chat, they'd find a way to implement it. It's not a priority.